


Prayers for the Lost

by all_these_ghosts



Category: The Wicked Years Series - Gregory Maguire, Wicked - All Media Types, Wicked - Schwartz/Holzman
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 04:18:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17073320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/all_these_ghosts/pseuds/all_these_ghosts
Summary: No more good deeds, and no harm either.





	Prayers for the Lost

**Author's Note:**

> This is slightly more bookverse than musicalverse in terms of the setting, but it's sufficiently AU that it probably works for either

Elphaba has never cared much for prayer.

It did nothing for her when she was young and wild and green. Her father always told her to pray for Nessarose, for him, for her dead mother, for the souls of the people he'd been sent to save. She did so, diligently, not that it ever made the slightest difference. 

Prayer, she figured, was for the satisfaction of the already-lucky, a tool to help them pretend they deserved every unearned thing. The lucky thank the Unnamed God for their good fortune, the easier to turn away everyone else. The unlucky, the unfavored. And so, as one of the unlucky herself, once she grew old enough to disobey her father she stopped. 

Now, though: now she prays. 

Every day she comes to a mauntery in the outskirts of the city to pray at the altar to St. Glinda, for her namesake. Sometimes as she moves around the city she hears her own Glinda's amplified voice, sees her face on the pages of newspapers or graffitied on old brick walls. She always sounds older than Elphaba remembers, and more tired. 

There is no altar that bears Fiyero's name. No Unionist chapel for a heathen prince, and even if there were, she has no prayers for him. Whenever his face crosses her memory she curls herself up and breathes through the onslaught. The same two words, over and over: _forgive me, forgive me, forgive me_. As though such a thing were possible. 

Fiyero bleeding, Fiyero dead, his body disappeared. She wishes that much at least: that she had been able to bury his body.

No more good deeds, and no harm either. She is a shadow, moving as easily through the vast forests as the manmade canyons of the Emerald City.

The maunts learn her. Early on they ask questions and offer blessings, but Elphaba knows she can’t be forgiven. Now they simply nod to her when they pass in the long corridors of the church or brush shoulders kneeling at St. Glinda’s altar.

A month passes like this, and then two. She had imagined — had she hoped? —that she might be carrying his child. Not that she would know what to do with a baby if she had one; not that it wouldn’t be one more opportunity for failure.

It would prove something, though. That she is real, that she is alive, that she was loved once. Now the only proof is her own faulty memory.

 _Fiyero_.

Six months, a year. 

She is nearly become a maunt herself now, though she’ll never take vows. She sleeps in their quarters and tends their sick and eats beside them, all in silence. It turns out that, of all things, she has a gift for healing. She spends long hours with the dying, offering what comfort she can. 

Some of the maunts use magic even though it’s forbidden by their order. Elphaba never does.

On a bright Summersend afternoon the Superior Maunt calls her in.

“I’d like to send you abroad,” she says without preamble. This is her way. It brooks no argument. “There are other Houses that could use your talents. Perhaps you could teach them something.”

Elphaba started shaking her head no the moment the Superior Maunt opened her mouth, but the old woman just narrows her eyes and insists. “Your time here is done, my girl. There are more places for you in the world than this.”

This feels impossible, yet in two days’ time she has packed her meager belongings and joined three other maunts on the journey north. They ride in the back of a merchant’s wagon, and as the Emerald City disappears behind them Elphaba feels like she’s finally able to breathe.

Maybe she should have done this sooner.

On the northern border of Gillikin, at the bare edge of the world, there is a hospital staffed by maunts. It is, the Superior Maunt informed her, a place of last resort. A place for the dead, the dying, and the lost.

Elphaba covers her face with a veil before they approach the door. The maunts in the Emerald City know who she is, but she is still a secret from the rest of the world. She supposes she will be for the rest of her life.

The maunt who answers the door is young — Elphaba’s own age, or even younger — and she greets them brightly. They are expected, and in this desolate place they are most welcome. Sister Tanika offers to settle the maunts in the dormitory next door, and Elphaba is left by herself to explore.

The first floor is quiet and impressively clean. Elphaba winds up a flight of stairs, and then another, before she hears voices behind a closed door. Two men, it sounds like — patients, then. She knocks.

“Come in,” a voice calls. A man, in a voice that sounds almost familiar — but no. Of course it isn’t. 

She opens the door, and it is.

He’s sitting in a chair next to a hospital bed. There are new scars on his face, and when he stands up to greet her he is unsteady on his feet, but it is unmistakably Fiyero.

Fiyero, who is dead. Fiyero, whose body they never found, never buried. 

Fiyero, who is here, older and ragged and whole. For a long moment Elphaba forgets how to breathe.

“Hello,” he says. “Are you the maunt from the Emerald City?”

She has never in her life been so grateful for this stupid veil. “I’m not a maunt,” she manages, trying to make her voice sound lower, rougher. It’s been so long since she heard herself speak. She’s almost surprised she remembers how. “Just a nurse.” 

He stares openly, like he’s trying to place her. She tries to keep her face neutral even under the veil. “Just a nurse,” he repeats flatly. 

Elphaba nods. She doesn’t dare speak again. 

“Lift your veil,” he says. In another life he was a prince and a captain, and the quiet command almost convinces her — but she can’t. 

She shakes her head.

Fiyero turns back to the young man in the hospital bed. “Please, excuse us for a moment,” he says, smiling, then gives Elphaba a hard look and drags her down the hall by her gloved hand.

He takes her into a small room and locks the door behind them. For a moment he remains facing the door, his hand still gripping the door knob. When he turns to her his face is written with so many emotions that she can’t place a single one. Maybe he hates her, maybe he loves her, maybe he’d eaten rancid porridge at breakfast—

“Please,” he whispers. “You sound — you sound just like her.”

Her legs shake. Maybe the ground is moving beneath them.

“I don’t — I shouldn’t have asked you that. But — I know it’s strange, but can you just take off a glove, at least, so I can see that you’re not—” Fiyero struggles, then trails off.

She tries, but her hands are shaking too. There is no turning back now; everything is already in motion. Whatever is going to happen will happen. She holds a hand out to him and he stares at her, then tugs on the glove, revealing the green beneath. 

Fiyero falls to his knees. 

Her vision blurs. She pulls off the hat and the veil and drops down next to him, only an arm’s length away.

“Everyone said you were dead,” he whispers, looking past her.

“They said the same about you.”

When he finally looks at her she holds her breath, steeling herself for the inevitable rejection. After everything, after all the danger and betrayal and those new scars wending their way down his neck and shoulder, how could he still want her? What could they possibly have left to say to one another? _This is when he walks away_ , she tells herself, _this is when he leaves you—_

Instead he closes the distance between them, wrapping her in his arms and burying his face in her neck.

He whispers her name. Elphaba closes her eyes, holding her jaw tight against the sob she’s been holding in since she saw him standing there.

His arms tighten around her and she clutches at him, touching everywhere she can reach. His waist, his arms, the hair at the nape of his neck. Fiyero does the same, stroking her back, her hips, his hands desperate and frantic, like if he doesn’t touch all of her _right now_ she might disappear.

She knows the feeling.

“You’re really here,” she says, pressing her forehead to his. “You’re not a dream. You’re not a ghost.”

“Not as far as I know,” he tries to joke. “Elphaba, what are you doing here?”

There is a longer version of this story, and one day she’ll tell him: about her prayers and her silence, about the last twelve months. For now she just says, “I’ve been staying with some maunts in the Emerald City. They sent me here to help at the hospital—”

The Superior Maunt’s face when she’d given Elphaba this new assignment, her raised eyebrow and her certainty. Had she known?

Elphaba makes a note to add the old maunt to her prayers tonight. And for the rest of her life, probably.

Fiyero seems satisfied enough with this information, but his brow furrows. He traces her lower lip with his thumb. “But… _you’re_ not a maunt, right?”

Elphaba shakes her head. “I don’t think they would take me.” 

“Well, thank Oz,” he says, and then, _finally_ , he kisses her: the taste of him like a song half-remembered; like a prayer not only heard, but answered.


End file.
